The Idiot uses Grafana and Influxdb to monitor Proxmox

Grafana is a data visualization tool that pulls in metrics from several data sources. For our purposes, we’ll be using influxdb, which is a database that is geared towards time-based metrics.

For this instance, I’m using a template within Proxmox, specifically debian-9.0-standard_9.3-1_amd64.tar.gz on a 64-bit platform. However, so long as you have a modern-ish version of Debian, this guide should work just as well. We’ll be using the CLI for the majority of our configurations, and assuming you’ve issued the superuser (su) to root. If not, prefix your commands with “sudo”.

NOTE: I don’t go over securing this setup. I plan on updating this guide with security enhancements. Avoid using this in a production environment without adding security features!

NOTE: The database can be named anything, just make sure you remember what you called it when you add the data source in Grafana. Also, the port can be anything you wish, just make sure it’s available on your network and matches your entry in the proxmox’s status.cfg later in the guide.

You should now be able to create graphs using the data pulled from Proxmox! You can experiment with the data sets by creating a new dashboard and then adding a new panel. I’ll give you an example of one of my “SingleStat” panel configurations; I use it to pull the CPU usage from a Proxmox host.